Packaging Policy

APK Fission consists of two official repositories and however many PPAs may exist at any given time. The two official repositories comprise the following:

The main repository contains free, open-source software which is not packaged by Alpine Linux or Adélie Linux.

The nonfree repository contains software where licensing issues present an active conflict with Alpine and Adélie’s licensing policies. Such software may or may not be distributed in a source form, such as firmware provided by vendors for use with their hardware.

Contributions may be made via the APK Fission git repository. Please submit issues or merge requests if you wish for APK Fission to package particular software.

Package Blacklist

The following software will never be packaged by APK Fission; PPAs may do so if they desire, but no official support will be provided.

Python 2.x: No support after 1 January 2020, officially and intentionally deprecated when 2.7 was released.

Pale Moon: Requires modified versions of libraries it depends on.

As a consequence, no software depending on the above will be packaged either.

‘All-in-one’ Packages

‘All-in-one’ (AIO) packages are those packages which contain a particular program and all of its dependencies. These packages should exist solely to package software which has so many dependencies that it is infeasible to directly package them all. Such packages should place the entirety of their contents into a /pkg/$pgname directory, except only for such files as are required to interface with OpenRC or s6, or any other init system or service manager, and those should be provided as a subpackage ($pkgname-openrc et al).

Personal Package Archives (PPAs)

PPAs allow third-parties, hereafter ‘groups’, to produce packages for Alpine and Adélie on their own time, without needing to commit to the respective distributions’ release cycles or adhere to their licensing policies.

Packages are produced for all officially-maintained releases of Adélie Linux, which at the time of writing are:

alpine-1.0-beta1 (coded as adelie-edge, unstable)

adelie-1.0-alpha7 (unstable, archived)

Groups may submit up to three APKBUILD files per distribution queue; if any of these submissions result in a build failure, all submissions belonging to the offending group still in any queue will be removed from the queue and the group responsible will be restricted to one APKBUILD across all queues until a submission successfully builds. Submissions in this mode will be placed last in the respective queue at the time of submission, rather than the usual dependency-based prioritization. All submissions will have their estimated wait times communicated clearly to the group when submitted.

Retention Policy

Groups who have not submitted any files for at least twelve months will be placed in an inactive state; they will be required to submit a successful APKBUILD file or contact a member of the APK Fission administration team in order to return to active status. If a group has had no activity for at least two years since the last submission, they will be considered abandoned, and the account and all associated packages will be removed.